Newfoundland Stories (13 page)

She snatched up her child and held him tightly to her body.

He pulled them away from the building. “There, there,” he comforted. “You're safe now. It's all over, so get along with ye before that old building falls down on top of you.”

He heard sirens. The firemen were on their way.

He needed a drink. To hell with the Salvation Army lady. He had to find Gertie.

On Sunday morning, Agnes O'Brien and Rita Shea made their way to the West End to attend morning mass at St. Patrick's.

“You must have got some shock,” Rita probed, eager for the details even though she had heard most of it before.

“Rita, my dear, I couldn't believe it when they brought Anne Marie and the baby over to my place like that in the middle of the night. All blackened, they were, and the stink of smoke on their clothes enough to drive you outdoors. Poor Anne Marie was beside herself for hours. Wouldn't put little Timmy out of her arms, she wouldn't. Poor little darling.

“I feel so guilty,” she continued. “I should never have let her go to live in that old flat over the store in the first place. I can see now it was nothing but a firetrap, and with John away on the boat most of the time … well I just can't think about it.”

“Oh well, they're safe enough now,” Rita said. “And that's all that matters.” Then she added, “I wonder who it was who went up and got them out? Perhaps we'll never find out.”

“Yes, maid,” Agnes replied. “I'd love to know that too. Anne Marie says she's certain she's seen the man around someplace but can't remember where. I would like nothing better than to meet him face to face myself and tell him how much I owe him. He must be a saint.”

“Well, they say God sends his angels to help us out in our times of trouble.” Rita slowed and grabbed Agnes' arm. “Look, there's that old drunk again, and on a Sunday morning too. It's disgusting.”

Stepping nimbly to avoid Roddie Murphy's outstretched legs, she continued, “They should get the likes of that off the streets and put them away somewhere where they can't bother decent people.”

“Yes,” agreed Agnes. “If they did that this city would certainly be a much better place, wouldn't it?”

AUTHOR'S NOTE

St. John's, like most cities and towns, has always had its share of
characters
known for the oddness or extreme nature of their actions. The public view of such individuals typically ranged from amusement to tolerance to aversion or disgust. Very few people, however, ever truly endeavoured to get to know the real persons living within some of these strange men and women. They were generally dismissed as oddballs or outcasts. This fictional story “The Drunk” is based on the true inner character of one such individual.

THE FUGITIVE

H
e knew they were coming for him. He had known it long before they rounded the point and came his way. He knew it before the two boats, each with four men aboard, had come ashore so close to him that he could hear their voices, even though he did not understand a word of what they said. Calmly accepting the inevitable, he had made no attempt to flee. In his weakened state he could never have outdistanced them any way. His only option was to hide until they left again. He was confident that he was safe in his concealment. He had chosen it well, a small impenetrable haven. His only fear was that his coughing sickness might betray him should they come too close. Having already hidden there for hours, his legs were now stiff from squatting on his haunches and pain racked his emaciated body. He knew that in order to survive, he might have to endure yet another long period of discomfort.

He watched as the white men searched the cove and the hills surrounding it. One of them came so close that he could smell the man's stinking body, and it sickened him. The man had paused scant feet away, suspicion written on his face, before shrugging and moving on again. They stayed there most of the day. Having satisfied themselves that the place was deserted, they lit a fire on the beach and cooked themselves a meal, after which they rested and drank, passing two jugs back and forth. For a while, he worried they were going to stay for the night and was relieved when they finally boarded their boats and started paddling out as the sun began its descent toward the horizon.

Still, despite his discomfort, he remained in his hiding place and waited, emerging only when the last vestiges of daylight streaked the western sky and he was certain that his antagonists were well away. He could scarcely move. His body refused to obey him. It took enormous effort to take the few faltering steps to the sandy beach below. There he rested again until the moon came up and he was able to continue on his way. He knew where he was going. It was not far.

He awoke the next morning to gentle, refreshing raindrops falling on his face. He went to the lake and drank deeply of its cool morning water. Although he had not eaten anything in days, he did not feel the need for food. He knew that his wasted body would have rejected it in any case. The rustling of the breeze in the birch trees and the barely audible sound of wavelets lapping against the shoreline calmed him. The calm pushed the events of the previous day from his mind. He surveyed his surroundings, the spectrum of autumn colours which stretched as far as he could see and the shimmering early morning blueness of the lake – his beloved lake – which had sustained him and his extended family for so long. The beauty of the morning stirred up images of similar autumn days long past when he and his people had been able to live there in peace.

Now, the sandy shoreline bore no evidence of the mamateek
⁶
in which he and his wife and children had once lived, or of the other mamateeks which had stretched out along this part of the lake in happier times. They had long since been dismantled and their parts destroyed or hidden to deny the ever-encroaching white men any knowledge of their existence.

The people were all gone now, having succumbed to the coughing sickness and starvation, and the brutality of the furriers, the white men who had infiltrated their wilderness and destroyed their way of life. He did not know if any of his people still lived. If they did, he did not know who, or where they might now be. The last of his people that he'd had contact with was his cousin Shanawdithit and her mother and older sister. All three, ridden with the coughing sickness, had surrendered into the custody of the whites, preferring the indignity of captivity to the death and horrific suffering that had surrounded them for so long. They had wanted him to come with them, but he refused. He could never, no matter how desperate his own circumstances, bring himself to live for even a single day in a white man's world.

He spent the day on the shore of the lake, sleeping as much as possible to avoid the pain and the frequent bouts of coughing that racked his body and to try to forget for a few minutes his loneliness and anguish. As darkness approached, he drank once more from the lake before retiring to the edge of the woods for the night.

For a few hours he slept the deep sleep of the un-damned, a fleeting respite from his suffering. Around midnight, when the moon was high, he awoke to see a brilliant succession of shooting stars blaze their way across the night sky. The stars stirred memories of the nights he had watched them as a boy from that very same spot. Those were better times. He remembered the annual canoe trips down the rivers to the great water where the tribe took all the salmon and shellfish they wanted and brought them back to the lake to sustain them through the long winter months. He remembered his part in herding the caribou along miles of sapling fences that his people had cleverly erected to drive the animals into the narrow pass where the hunters could easily kill them with their arrows and lances. He remembered the quarters of caribou meat that had hung over smoking charcoals and how the women scraped and chewed the hides to incredible softness. He also remembered his participation in daring raids to steal and damage the property of the white settlers along the coast. He recalled fondly the night he and five others from his tribe had hidden in their canoe under the wharf of the white chief while angry fishermen trod only inches above their heads. It was the night they had set adrift the white chief 's boat with its summer's load of salted salmon.
⁷

Those times were long gone now. His thoughts turned to the times that had followed – the bad times. He shuddered as he remembered being awakened one cold spring morning by a large number of white men who had unexpectedly crept upon him and his family and the others as they slept, surrounding their mamateeks and ordering them out into the frigid morning air. He could never forget the sequence of events that had ensued that day. The sight of his aunt, Demasduit, being manhandled and dragged away by the white intruders was forever etched in his memory, as was the horror of her husband Nonosbawsut, the leader of their small tribe, being stabbed and bludgeoned to death as he desperately tried to wrestle her from their grasp. The despair that followed had been unbearable, made even worse by the death of Demasduit's motherless baby three days later.

Life before that had been difficult enough for him and his people. They had long since been cut off from their traditional routes to the coastal waters which they needed for access to the seafood and other marine resources that nourished and supported them. They were now forced to survive primarily on the trout of the lake and the plants surrounding it. Even their access to the caribou herds had been virtually eliminated. Whiteman's diseases had left many of his people too maimed and weakened to carry on any semblance of normal life. After Demasduit's capture and the slaying of Nonosbawsut, life became infinitely worse. Fear and the ever-present danger from the growing population of white people drove them even farther into hiding and a subsistence of utter, abject misery.

Memories still flooded his mind when the first hint of light appeared in the east and tiny songbirds began their trilling to herald the advent of another day. Suddenly, a particularly violent paroxysm of coughing seized his body and he retched uncontrollably. Blood gushed from his mouth and soaked the front of his garment and the ground around him. He tried to drag himself farther into the bushes but could not.

Then he saw them coming. He was not afraid. For the first time in a long, long while, peace filled his mind, and he was happy. The ancestors had come to claim him, to escort him to
Theehone
.
⁸
His ordeal was finally over. They beckoned and he went to them.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Shanawdithit is generally acknowledged to be the last member of the Beothuk race. It is highly probable, however, that at the time of her surrender to the white settlers in 1823 there was still a small number of other Beothuk survivors who remained in the wilderness to fend for themselves. Joseph R. Smallwood's
Book of Newfoundland
(St. John's: Newfoundland Book Publishers Limited, 1967) reinforces this point with a reference to the finding of two drowned Beothuk men subsequent to Shanawdithit's surrender. The Beothuk character in this fictional story could have been one such individual.

6
Mamateek is the Beothuk word for wigwam or living place. They were constructed of layers of birch bark spread over a frame of fir poles with a hole in the centre of the roof from which smoke could escape.

7
This raid by the Beothuk occurred on the property of John Peyton, Jr., renowned salmon merchant and magistrate from Exploits, Notre Dame Bay.

8
Theehone
is the Beothuk word for the afterlife. It is believed that the Beothuk honoured the sun and the moon. An origin myth suggests that the Beothuk race sprang from an arrow from the sky that stuck into the earth and transformed itself into human form.

MAGGIE'S LAMENT

M
aggie's tea sat cold in her cup and her tea biscuit lay untouched on the table. The stove fire had burned down hours earlier and the chill of the night air infiltrated the house, bringing with it dampness and discomfort. Still, she continued to sit at the kitchen table, staring into nothingness and dreading the thought of going up to bed for yet another night of sleeplessness. She was grieving, and had been for a long while.

Her sorrow was rooted in time, more than ten years, and increasingly overwhelmed her with each passing day. She could see no end to it, and no longer knew how to deal with it, for her profound sadness was not a grief one normally associates with death, loss, or sickness. That, she could have dealt with. Indeed, many years earlier she had coped with the loss of her husband, William, mourned his passing, and gotten over his death to resume raising their children. Time had eased the pain. She still remembered, though, and kept the treasured memories of their life together in a special and private chamber of her heart.

Her all-consuming sorrow now was for the living and the healthy – her own three sons: Albert, Charlie, and Fred, the pride of her life and the centre of her existence. Having reared them mostly on her own, she had seen them blossom from babies into lusty, vibrant boys filled with energy and life. At times she had wondered where she might get the strength and energy herself to keep up with them. Sadly, they were now the cause of her grief. For the three boys, who had been each other's best friends, who had played together and stood up for and protected each other against all perils, had grown apart. Adults now, with wives and children of their own, they no longer spoke to each other. In their tiny village, they were strangers, passing on the road without as much as a nod of recognition. Their wives, too, didn't associate with each other because their husbands discouraged them from doing so. The estrangement had even descended to their children, and though some of them were in the same grades in school, they never played together.